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Office bug patch highlights for May 2016

A few of the May 2016 patches Microsoft Office caught our eye with embarrassing bug fixes, previously not disclosed to customers.

They all apply to older Office releases: Office 2016 and before.  It’s a long-standing Microsoft trick to hide embarrassing bugs from customers until they have a fix.  In the meantime, customers waste time and effort chasing a problem they can’t fix themselves.

Japanese Era updates

The most important fixes aren’t for bugs at all. It’s (we hope) the end of Office updates for the change of Imperial Era in Japan.

Office 2016 KB4462119

Office 2016 KB44622443

These updates combine to let users to get the new Japanese era information.

Word 2016: KB4464536

This patch has a grab bag of security and bug fixes including a Japanese era fix for the Postcard Design Wizard in the Japanese release of Word 2016

Outlook S/MIME reply or forward bug

This bug afflicts Outlook 2016, Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2010.

” When you reply or forward digitally signed email messages with Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME), Outlook 2016 incorrectly blocks images in the email messages.”

Excel 2016: KB4464550

  • If you install the update 4462115or later Excel updates, after you select the total row or column, Excel 2016 crashes.
  • After hiding a column in PowerPivot, you are unable to sort PivotTable fields in data source order.
  • A large volume of RealTimeData (RTD) updates combined with multiple workbooks opened in Excel 2016 may cause Windows to be unresponsive.
  • Improves translations in the Finnish, German and Russian versions of Excel 2016.

OneNote 2016 KB4461441

Office 2016 KB4464552

Another twin patch to fix a bug:

” Synchronizing a notebook from OneNote 2016 fails and you receive the following error message:
We’re sorry, something went wrong during sync. We’ll try again later. (Error code: 0x803D0000) “

Outlook 2016: KB4464540

This patch, among other things, fixes all day meeting support.  Microsoft calls this an ‘improvement’ but it’s really fixing Outlook so it works the way people would expect it to.

“All-day meetings now display on the same month and date(s) for the organizer and all attendees, regardless of the organizer’s time zone, the meeting’s time zone, or each attendee’s time zone. For all-day and multi-day meetings, the When field shows the start dates and the end dates with “(All day)” instead of specific times.”

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